Butts Detective

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  Smoking detector model

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  Patrol robot prototype

Inspiration

Georgia Tech is a smoke-free campus with the goal of creating a healthy, safe environment for all students and faculties. However, it is difficult to monitor smoking behaviors on campus. We think collecting butts on the street and forcing people who were smoking to stop would match our goal of sustainability.

What it does

Our robot after full development with proper hardware will be able to randomly patrol the campus. It will clamp the cigarettes butts on the streets and throw them into the trash can that the robot carries. It also detects smoking behaviors on campus and takes the cigarettes away from people who were smoking using its robotic arm. If the person leaves before the robot successfully clamps the cigarettes, our robot will adjust its velocity to catch the person.

How we built it

We used some online sources to develop a trained deep learning model that recognizes smoking behaviors using the camera. We assembled a robot car as a prototype due to hardware limitations. The robot car is able to move around itself and avoid obstacles without predetermined routes while the completed robot should be assigned to specific routes based on the campus map. We also mounted a camera as it can detect smoking behavior by running the model. In the future, we will need robotic arms to achieve the clamping action.

Challenges we ran into

The Lafvin smart car kit lacked parts. Some of its components do not function as they should, it took us a large amount of extra time to fix.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to assemble the robot and wrote an obstacle avoidance program that can run on its Arduino. We also managed to use the ESP32-CAM module to live stream video and use our deep learning model to recognize if the person is smoking or not.

What we learned

Deep learning can be combined with Robots to complete various tasks such as behavior detection. We have obtained a deeper understanding of computer vision in this project. Also, this project is heavily hardware-focused but many of us do not have in-depth knowledge in this field. During the process, we learned the common errors and how to troubleshoot them. Meanwhile, we learned to deploy video streaming from microcontrollers.

What's next for Butts Detective

Due to the lack of a Mechanical Arm, we did not achieve the original plan of taking the cigarettes away from smokers. We may continue to work on this function in the future.

Built With

• arduino
• python